French Canal Expansion Project Allows Pushboats, Barges

American-style push towboating is coming to northern France.

The Seine-Nord canal, France’s largest waterways infrastructure project in more than 25 years, is well into its construction phase. This large-gauge canal, 107 kilometers long and 54 meters wide, will stretch from the Oise River to the Dunkirk-Escaut Canal, crossing 64 municipalities: 25 in Oise, 26 in Somme, 11 in Pas-de-Calais and two in Nord.

It is a key link in the Seine-Scheldt waterway network, which connects the French network to 20,000 km. of European waterways. Routinely called the “project of the century” in French and European news accounts, it’s designed to replace the narrower Canal du Nord, which opened in the mid-1960s. The Seine-Nord Canal formally got underway in 2017 after decades of planning and is expected to be completed by 2032.

This year, construction began on the Montmacq Lock, the first in the canal’s lock network. Because five of these locks feature massive drops between 13 and 25 meters, they will incorporate innovative water-saving basins capable of recycling 75 percent of the water used during each vessel passage to combat drought conditions.

Financing has been shared by the European Union, the French national government and regional governments.

“It will thus enable the development of inland waterway transport, an environmentally friendly solution for freight transport and a driver of competitiveness for local production and attractiveness for the regions,” the project’s website says, using much the same language that Americans use to tout waterways projects in the United States.

The canal will charge tolls, in accordance with France’s current canal fee system. Cargoes on the new canal will be carried on pushboats and barges, unlike the older live-aboard “narrowboat” barges that may be familiar to some Americans from old movies, or who may have taken French vacations on those picturesque barges converted to floating hotels.

Neither the towboats nor the overall tows will be as large as those on the Mississippi River. The Seine-Nord Europe Canal will be able to accommodate barges measuring up to 185 meters long and 11.40 meters wide. Boats called pousseurs (pushers), similar to American pushboats but smaller, will push two-barge tows.

Each barge, however, will be significantly larger than a Mississippi River barge. A single standard European Class Vb barge is roughly 56 feet longer and 2.5 feet wider than a standard Mississippi River hopper barge.

A graphic on the canal website shows one of these barges carrying up to 21 TEUs, or container equivalents. Container-on-barge is much more important in Europe than it has been, so far, in the U.S. In some parts of the European inland waterways network, container on barge (COB) has hovered near or just below 10 percent of all waterborne cargoes since the 2010s, especially in Germany and parts of the Netherlands. But because the old Canal du Nord was a bottleneck, France has been much less able to take TEUs off the roads and onto barges. That will change when the Seine-Nord Canal is complete, backers hope.

Learn more on the canal’s official website at https://www.canal-seine-nord-europe.fr/en